For not supporting Linux as a client platform. Near as I can determine, Major League Baseball – an otherwise astute new media organization – only makes their Gameday audio (and presumably MLB.tv) available to customers with access to Windows Media player. I’m sure there’s a way to get it working w/ VLC & Firefox, but I didn’t have time to figure it out because I was missing an in progress Red Sox / Yankees tilt. For that, I was willing to boot into Windows.
This is why I have difficulty with organizations that standardize on closed standards like Windows Media; it’s not that I have anything against Windows Media Player – it’s a fine platform that I don’t mind using while on Windows. But Microsoft declines to make it available on Linux (I am aware of Wine and CrossOver), which is what I use the majority of the time. Such is their prerogative, of course, but I wish content providers would think about those of us on non-Windows platforms every once in a while. While Linux is obviously a neglible market in terms of share, neglecting it – and other platforms that WMP doesn’t support – seems like a less than ideal approach. I wonder, for example, how the folks from Sun feel about that, given the attention they’re giving Solaris. Real Player, for those of you that are curious, has a Linux version.
While all of this is nowhere near as irritating and MLB’s asinine and generally incomprehensible blackout rules (the primary reason I can’t watch the game on TV), it should be fixed.
Jaime Cardoso says:
May 2, 2006 at 4:53 am
I’m guessing that everyone, not simply the folks at Sun feels bad about such things. I, for example, feel bad because I’m denied content and because it’s yet another example of incompetence, stupidity and general lack of vision.
It was Tim Berners-Lee who said “Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”
Craig says:
May 17, 2006 at 9:23 am
I share your ire at mlb.com 😛 Last year, their media player worked fine in linux, but this year seems to be windows only, even with MPlayer plugin working perfectly with just about every other format. This is incredibly annoying, since I work nights and can only keep up with most games by watching the clips on mlb.com. Like you, I have to boot windows just to do this, and it’s annoying as hell. If you find out who to complain to about this, let me know. Or if you find a workaround with VLC or anything else.
Craig
Chris says:
May 30, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Here is the response I got from MLB.com (complete with misspellings and using “u” for “you”) on 5/29/2006:
Dear christopher,
We are just using windows medid player right now there no way u can use
linux. We really appreciate your feedback and comments and have
forwarded your email to the appropriate person.
Thank you again for taking the time to write!
Regards,
dd, MLB.com Support
****
Just another way to screw over people by MLB, it isn’t enough that they hold cities hostage to pay for stadiums I guess.
Justin Shaffer says:
June 5, 2006 at 10:07 am
Hi Guys,
I appreciate the dialogue and am looking forward to joining. Regarding that CS response, we’re already addressing it.
Regarding the platform issue, unfortunately we’re in an interesting position, in that scale has somewhat dictated our direction to date. Due to the concurrency requirements for our live games, until alternative methods of distribution are more feasible, we’re somewhat forced to go with who can support volume over time for live streaming – which today is windows media with our current cdn partner. While it may appear to you at the moment as neglect, our charter is to serve baseball fans – regardless of their platform choice – and we are actively pursuing options that will make this more accessible. Its become quite clear we can’t trust that software vendors who make this stuff will get it right – so it becomes our responsibility.
I was unaware that MPlayer isn’t working, as our streams are fairly vanilla windows media 9 w/o drm – there shouldnt be any reason you can’t get it going. Personally, I’m on a mac at the moment and have been less than impressed with msfts decision to stop developing years ago and now stop supporting their mac client. Flip4mac doesn’t get me quite where I’d like to be functionality wise either. We’ve had a tremendous amount of feedback from our mac user base and are pursuing alternatives for them.
Justin Shaffer says:
June 5, 2006 at 10:07 am
Hi Guys,
I appreciate the dialogue and am looking forward to joining. Regarding that CS response, we’re already addressing it.
Regarding the platform issue, unfortunately we’re in an interesting position, in that scale has somewhat dictated our direction to date. Due to the concurrency requirements for our live games, until alternative methods of distribution are more feasible, we’re somewhat forced to go with who can support volume over time for live streaming – which today is windows media with our current cdn partner. While it may appear to you at the moment as neglect, our charter is to serve baseball fans – regardless of their platform choice – and we are actively pursuing options that will make this more accessible. Its become quite clear we can’t trust that software vendors who make this stuff will get it right – so it becomes our responsibility.
I was unaware that MPlayer isn’t working, as our streams are fairly vanilla windows media 9 w/o drm – there shouldnt be any reason you can’t get it going. Personally, I’m on a mac at the moment and have been less than impressed with msfts decision to stop developing years ago and now stop supporting their mac client. Flip4mac doesn’t get me quite where I’d like to be functionality wise either. We’ve had a tremendous amount of feedback from our mac user base and are pursuing alternatives for them.
I’m happy to address questions/comments etc. – feel free to get in touch.
Charlie says:
July 14, 2006 at 1:07 am
You guys still trying to get the live games to play on Mplayer?
Matt Bryant says:
June 14, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I got this to work using the MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin for firefox on Linux.
Essentially, the plugin grabs the stream information from the MLB.com media player page, then launches an external program (VLC,mplayer) to play the stream.
Check it out …
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/446
Works great on Ubuntu with VLC.
jon says:
June 18, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I’ve also used the MediaPlayerConnectivity solution, on XP and Ubuntu, I like VLC way better than the MS crap— plus you can easily get full screen and all that jazz.
Sports Scatter says:
July 9, 2008 at 8:36 pm
What bugs me is 1) I used to be able to listen to just about any game I wanted to on the Web over a variety of formats before MLB.com started charging people; 2) MLB always uses a different format as a teaser in spring training that works on everything from konqueror to nameyourbrowser here, then after you’ve decided its finally going to work this year and paid for the subscription they switch the format to start the season to something that is even difficult to get firefox or opera to play on Windows itself; 3) The technology gets more proprietary every year as you used to simply be able to use windows media player, real player, realalternative, or anything else that could run their codecs..the move to the horrendously proprietary macromedia (now adobe) products disabled half my stuff and forced me to put that bruteware back on my windows machine; 4) Instead of becoming more responsive to user needs they are threatening to go to silverlight which is the most proprietary piece of mediaplaying trash ever to hit the market; 5) MLB is going completely away from lowbandwidth streams, especially with their tv package which makes it impossible for someone living in the country on a metered internet connection to watch games; 6) MLB blacks out teams based on zip code instead of proximity so I’m blacked out for a team that is a 5 hour drive one direction and allowed to watch a team that is a 5 hour drive in the other direction…but I don’t live any close than that to any stadiums. I don’t even have local TV stations that carry baseball, so why exactly should I be blacked out? So I’ll drive 280miles for a nightcap? The whole ship is going the wrong way and MLB doesn’t care…if they did they’d just turn things back ten years and fix the stupid zip codes thing that the stupid commissioner told a complaining fan at the All-star game he was looking into about 5 years ago and nothing has changed.
howard says:
December 10, 2008 at 6:18 am
well, i guess it should b fine using http://us.zaptiger.com with linux.
video streams for all the matches are linked.